What you'll primarily find here are the style and theory behind my personal practice, which, while it had its beginning in the martial arts, is not obviously combat-related in its current form.

Monday, September 3, 2012

a firm foundation: unweighting, part one

Once you can comfortably sit/stand with your feet spread about 1.5 times the distance between your shoulders, bend your knees sufficiently to place them directly above the balls of your feet, and hold that position for half a minute or so, it's time to begin playing around with variations on the theme.

The first and most important variation is about whether your weight is equally distributed on both feet or supported primarily by one foot.

To begin with, simple move your body gently in a sideways rocking motion, left-right-left-right. Take your time with this, and pay attention to how it feels in your feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, hips, buttocks, lower back, and belly. Practice for a short time, whenever you can, being careful not to overtire ANY of these links in the chain.

Start with your feet fairly close together (a high stance) and your toes pointed outward at about 30 to 45 degrees, then move your feet further apart (a lower stance) as your muscles begin to warm up and loosen up. Finish off by moving your feet closer together again.

For now it's enough to move 10% of your weight back and forth, so you move from placing 60% of your weight on one foot to placing 60% of your weight on the other. (If the math doesn't seem to work out, remember that equal distribution is 50% on each foot.)

When you are ready to go further, you can move more of your weight back and forth, deepen your stance (move your feet further apart), and spend more time in lower stances.

As before, it's best to have something soft in front of you in case you need an escape route.

About Me

I began life in Nebraska and Kansas, moved to Colorado shortly before my twentieth birthday, and have lived here, mainly in Boulder, for most of my adult life. I have long-standing interests in the martial arts (born of feeling physically vulnerable), ‘appropriate technology’, computing, and robotics, having come to this by way of the potential for robotics to radically transform agricultural practice for the better. More recently I've developed an interest in musical scales built from integer ratios of frequencies (Just Intonation), enough so that it drove me to learn to program for iOS, culminating in an iPad app in 2010 (now removed from the App Store). Building upon that initial skill-set consumes much of my spare time, and I've become interested in applying it to other things, including robotics.